Bravo! I have always wondered why people avoided the classic scifi novels. Often many of these where cerebral- more philosophy than action. But as far back as Twilight Zone and Outer Limits showed you could sucessfully film philosophical scfi.
Instead we end up with endless comic book treatments. I dont not want to see the fourth origin story of Spiderman, Superman or Batman. However, I have to concede with a good script and director, these sometimes work.
I wish I could see more more Heinlein on film, e.g. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Stranger in a Strange Land. Partial treatments were in The Last Starfigher and Star Treks What of Charlie.
Well, the early Foundation books are pretty 'of their time'.
In either the first or second book I seem to remember one of the only female characters is depicted succeeding despite being a woman. Which is a very 50s view.
Same with Heinlein, almost all the women in stranger in a strange land are cringe worthy. They literally play in the pool all day long and are basically sexual playthings for the men.
I read (in the case of Asimov, re-read) both a couple of years ago, they've really aged poorly. While the concepts are cool, much of the stories would have to be rewritten or you'll have some real cognitive dissonance with the female parts.
The later Asimov books and prequels are better as they were written in the 80s. But then they suffer from his retconning of bringing all his series together. I don't know what others think about it as I read most of them before the internet, but I felt it was very contrived.
I have just recently started listening to the audiobook versions (currently at the third) and the absence of any female characters is extremely jarring. The first book only has one and it is "somebody's unhappy wife, who promptly stops complaining when presented with a shiny jewel". Second book at least has one active character.
I agree that the adaptation will have to be adapted a lot in order to be shown today. I wouldn't even mind if they modified the society structure a bit (or a lot) in order to make the initial premise more believable.
I adore the film adaptation of Starship Troopers. It was the right way, I think, to bring many of the themes of the book to cinema. Particularly it’s strong satire of modern militaristic hubris.
I’d imagine a similar treatment might work for the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, unlike the Netflix’s the Expanse where it devolved from excellent work building into a single overearnest spaceship crew solving all the solar system’s problems.
The term is plenty clear: a show for which Netflix has some degree of exclusive distribution rights. In this case, it's an "Original" because Netflix handles some of the international distribution.
I am not sure if Game of Thrones' incest storylines have prepared the ground for Heinlein's incredibly creepy relationships. But in a way, young adult fiction has just been remaking Tunnel in the Sky over and over again for the last 10-15 years, so there's that.
I've been disappointed by nearly every film adaptation of Asimov novels. I, Robot and Bicentennial Man had big budgets, but seemed like they were written by people who simply didn't like Asimov at all and wanted nothing to do with the kinds of stories he told.
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.
The film I, Robot originally had no connections with Isaac Asimov's Robot series. It started with an original screenplay written in 1995 by Jeff Vintar, entitled Hardwired. [1]
Gods, reading that was depressing. So many reviews called it some variant of "smart", which is not on the list of adjectives I would use.
I likely would have enjoyed it more had I not been expecting an Asimov story on film. I like Will Smith a lot, but somehow he's been in multiple films that ruined favorite books from my youth (I Am Legend is another book that I love and that had an abysmal film adaptation...I don't blame Smith, though, as he did a great job even in a very cheesy film). I, Robot was also pretty cheesy even without the weight of trying to live up to Asimov's legacy.
It was fantastic up until the vampires/zombies turned into cartoons. One of the scariest scenes I've ever seen was the bit where he goes in after the dog and the vamps are all huddled in a circle shivering in the dark. That was some top notch creepy. And it was brilliant acting by Smith (so much of the scariness of that scene was just because the character was scared).
But, then we got a closer look at them a bit later and they were flying through the air, bouncing off the walls, and just all around looking like cartoon monsters. I'm just not frightened by cartoons. And, it really killed the slow, calm, horror of the book for me. The things that made the book unique and scary in a way that sticks with you are just fundamentally different from the jump scares of the film.
The Vincent Price adaptation (The Last Man On Earth) remains the most faithful film version of I Am Legend, in spirit if not in specific detail. I don't really mind when a movie script changes some plot points or some character details to make it work on screen, I just dislike it when the spirit of the thing is thrown away and replaced with blockbuster tropes (which is my primary complaint about I, Robot, as well).
But, again, I thought Will Smith was excellent in the role. I just really hate what they did with the vamps.
No, but the evolution of Galatea, from an almost comical robot to one that assists the death of Portia (in a beautiful scene) out of mercy is deeply moving.
It's a very good movie, even if not faithful to the original.
I felt that the Will Smith movie was pretty good and true to Asimov's stories. There is a common theme in Asimov's stories that he exploits loopholes in the interpretation of the 3 laws. I robot the movie did that pretty faithfully. It also hinted towards the advent of a robot like R Daneel, who would see beyond the 3 laws.
The movie didn't adapt any particular book or short story, but that doesn't mean it didn't try to be faithful to Asimov.
The movie dumbed down the books complex issues we'll face with Robots to "They're going to take over the world". But at least Isaac Asimov was always promoting Dos Equis and Converse shoes in his books so they got that right...
I've always maintained that the Will Smith movie captured the spririt of the Asimov Robot stories, in an accessible way. I never understood the hate it gets.
A fundamental principle of Asimov's writing about robots was that the Three Laws were inviolate. Yes, the Zeroth law was introduced, but there was literally only one robot capable of handling that transition.
In the movie you have thousands of robots running around killing and injuring countless humans. That's something I'm quite sure would never happen in Asimov's writing.
Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope that everyone before him used (all the way back to the first use of the term "robot" in Karel Čapek's R.U.R.). So, despite that groundbreaking approach, what do we get in the first major motion picture about his robot series? A robot uprising...
Which is a bit of a plot cop-out in itself, in my opinion... But even if we consider that "one" robot, it doesn't change the fact that the central plot of the movie was a robot uprising, and involved a lot of humans killed by robots (something R. Daneel (the only robot to sustainably invoke the 0th law) never did).
Sorry, should have included a spoiler tag, I guess...
At the end of Robots and Empire he allows Mandamus to activate his "nuclear intensifier", which will eventually render the Earth uninhabitable over the course of several decades (thereby driving humanity to colonize more stars). R. Giskard decided it was in the best interest of humanity for them to disperse, but couldn't rule out the possibility that some humans would be harmed in the process, so he permanently shut down.
Right. I understood that sustainably was intentional, but I kind of feel like if you don't already know the context it was subtle enough that you might not get that an Asimov robot was at least once involved in (very likely) a mass death event.
And I think there are at least some implications that Daneel was at least peripherally involved in much larger events than the person-by-person manipulation we see in the prequel books directly (ie. famines), but he saved himself by keeping himself more remote from them than literally pulling the switch.
Had the master robot in I, Robot actually suffered for its implementation of the zeroth law I think that would have been at least a little more in keeping with Asimov's vision, so I think it's a bit important to recognize that robots CAN do great harm with the zeroth law, there are just consequences.
(and we can probably ignore the fact that the three-Bs extended books resurrected Dors and iirc somewhat even Giskard)
Thanks for articulating this. I had a lot problems with this person exclusion of the 'frankenstien' complex as an inseparable part of Asimovs robot stories. I couldn't put my finger on it, as you did.
Well, to be clear, I agree with them that the I, Robot film is not in the spirit of the asimov stories precisely because it invokes the zeroth law without any of the counterbalances Asimov built into his stories from the very beginning.
Daneel and Giskard's interventions are scary, but in the end they do appear to be truly in keeping with a species-wide application of the first law, in that their attempts to 'preserve humanity' were not just a rote idea of "keep humanity alive at any cost" but to preserve the components of humanity that they didn't themselves understand like individuality, creativity, and a drive to learn and explore (very star trekky really).
If I want to get too deep into the subject, it seems like a robot that interpreted the first law so narrowly would never be capable of developing a zeroth law to begin with, because its focus would be so intent on a narrow idea of what a human was, ignoring social concepts altogether (as for eg. Solarian robots do).
To be fair though it has been a REALLY long time since I've seen the movie.
I personally don't have a problem with a robot uprising, tropes are tropes for a reason. They're a shorthand that audiences are familiar with, metaphors that can have deeper meaning, which it does in this case. Ie the embodyment of the menace the zeroeth law represents, in the otherwise peaceful, subservient robots that live among us.
Sure, tropes make for fine movies. I think I, Robot was a fine movie, if you aren't trying to compare it to Asimov's work.
I don't know how you can say it both captures the spirit of Asimov's writings while also having a robot uprising as the central plot device. Asimov explicitly rejected the "Frankenstein complex" that was present in robot related sci-fi up to that point.
And its application of the zeroth law is nothing like daneel's careful application, endlessly riding the line to becoming inoperable because of the conflicts it causes. That's an important aspect to the concept as Asimov envisioned it that's completely lacking in the film.
Also I don't think Asimov's robots would have ever had a slave mode that rendered them immune to application of the laws. They probably still would have gone inoperative before actually carrying out a massacre.
Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws. The movie was very crude about showing it, but it was the same concept present in every Asimov short story.
> Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope
I, robot the movie did that too. It showed that a robot could glimpse at the spirit behind the laws and act not according to the letter, but according to the spirit of the laws. Finally, he helped the humans thwart the uprising, and the movie ends with the suggestion that he will influence other robots to see his viewpoint.
> Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws.
Huh? There is literally one story (Little Lost Robot) where there is a "loophole" in the laws (and only because the First Law is modified to drop the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" bit).
EDIT: in thinking about it further, I guess I'd add That Thou Are Mindful Of Him to the list of "loophole" stories. Still, two examples out of dozens of stories is very much the exception, not the rule.
Runaround: in following the letter of the laws, the robots put our protagonists in danger of dying, which would obviously violate the spirit of the first law.
Reason: the robots decide to redefine the term "human"
Catch that rabbit: robot ignores first law unless forced by humans in a sticky situation (though this one is a bit ehhh)
Liar: to avoid "hurting" the feelings of humans, a mind-reading robot hurts them in a much more real way
Escape: due to a technical interpreation of hyperspatial travel, robot prevents humans from discovering hyperspatial travel. Vilating first law in the long term since humanity couldn't survive without a means of fast space travel.
Evitable conflict: machines decide that the only way to perfectly follow the laws is to take control over humanity, which is the exact thing the laws were supposed to prevent.
Little lost robot: you said it
That's 7 out of the 9 stories in I, Robot. I have noticed this in most of his short stories and novels.
>A fundamental principle of Asimov's writing about robots was that the Three Laws were inviolate.
In universe, maybe. But the actual purpose of the Three Laws as a plot device was for them to be violated, and provide the crux of the story that followed.
Of course - he wasn't actually trying to formulate a coherent ethical framework for artificial intelligence and demonstrate its utility, he was writing mystery stories with robots.
The I, Robot script started out as something entirely unrelated, and some minor tweaks were made to "Asmovify" it after they got the rights for the I, Robot name.
In all of Asimov's robot short stories (including I, Robot), there was only one instance of a robot that violated the Three Laws. That's far from a common theme...
Yes, there was the 0th Law in Robots and Empire (that later appears in the Foundation prequels), but that is a far more nuanced concept than the ideas in the I, Robot movie, where robots ran around killing and injuring humans indiscriminately.
> In all of Asimov's robot short stories (including I, Robot), there was only one instance of a robot that violated the Three Laws.
However, in every single story, the robot(s) found a loophole in the laws that resulted in going against the spirit of the laws. It's true that the movie showed a very crude version vs the very nuanced take in the stories. But I attribute that to the medium of film making itself.
One is book vs script length. A film is 100 pages. Novels are 250+. This means big story-arch rewrites. It can really kill plot & character development. This is where series open up a lot of possibility.
That's usually the biggest adaption, but there are lots of other big things that must change. Novels can do character thoughts, exposition and other things well. For example, a strategic battle scene will work in a book. In a film, it's near impossible so they focus on action and drama. Films do visual representation, so action-rich scenes work. They get characters for "free," actors will represent a highly nuanced person in a way you immediately understand.
These add up to a big re-write, that cannot be avoided.
Writers like Asimov are the very best storytellers. They work on their own schedule, write what comes to them, discard bad work... If you handed a good novelist the task of writing a LOTR prequel novel about Frodo's parents, by October... It probably won't be as good as Tolkien's.
You just can't replicate genius on commission.
This is really evident in Game of Thrones. The early seasons capture what's great about the books. A politically driven story that isn't boring, a novel approach to magical realism... Early seasons were loyal to the book. The latest season was mostly "off-script." The politics got stupid. Characters wandered closer to fantasy tropes. The "realism" part of magical realism was gone. Apart from big plot points, it wasn't written by GRRM and it showed. So, it is not good in the ways he's good. It was also written much quicker, on a schedule.
It'll be hard to capture Asimov in a series, harder than GRRM I expect. His stories are just not story driven enough.
His main plot device is not a spaceship or a time machine, it's a fictional theory, psychohistory. How do you capture that on film, line charts?
I always felt a movie was more analogous to a short story (one of the best PKD adaptations is Minority Report, even if that adaptation has issues), where a book is more akin to a season of a TV show, and each book in a series maps to a season of a show.
Well Apple Music is available on Android and you can also access it via iTunes on Windows. Current Apple original video content is accessed via Apple Music (and third party movies via the iTunes store) so it’s probably going to be one of those options.
Personally I pay €15 per month for an Apple Music family plan because at the time it was cheaper than Spotify and it works well enough for me. Hopefully Apple’s new video services becomes part of that same subscription but with the mess of their iCloud storage options I won’t hold my breath.
Well they certainly won't have to worry about running out of source material...
I really hope this is good but they need to go full game of thrones in terms of scope and adherence to the source material. I'm so tired of seeing "Based on a story by Philip K Dick" and then basically seeing stereotypical sci-fi with a romance plot thrown in and any trace of the original message of the story removed.
I'm a huge sci fi fan (anyone on HN who is not?) and gave Foundation a go, and found it to have flashes of brilliance but overall to be lifeless and frankly pretty boring.
It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.
To be fair, there was something strangely appealing about it, and by the end I found I quite liked it even with its flaws - probably because there were some really imaginative concepts underneath (the Foundation I suppose).
> It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.
This could probably be attributed to its pulp origins -- it wasn't originally a set of novels, but a bunch of pulp serials that were in the same universe.
Yeah. It can't really be compared to something like Dune. It's a different format. Although I love Dune, I read most of my science fiction in short story format, so Foundation seems normal to me.
I remember an interview where Asimov had a fan tell him all the interesting parts of his stories were glossed over. And it's true for action scenes. He always does all the backstory and intrigue, then the action starts and he tends to skip to the conclusion of the event.
I think given this, that Asimov was about drama an the unfolding, in a SF backdrop; TV is a very good venue.
I read the series as a twelve or thirteen year old and loved it, but when I tried rereading it a few years ago I came to the same conclusion.
As mentioned in another comment, it began as a serialized work, and it never really escapes Asimov's "make it up as you go along" style, resulting in quite a meandering series. I think it would have to be a very loose adaptation to make it interesting.
I agree with that assessment, and it's pretty much Asimov's style. I don't really get why Foundation is considered by so many to be he best work. Personally, of the stuff I've read anyway, I think it's The Gods Themselves.
>the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail
But that's part of the unique strength of the early Foundation books. What makes the experience powerful is that the reader's imagination is left to fill in the gaps. The trick was to write a sufficiently epic framework, which succeeded because inspiration was drawn from Gibbon's famous account of the decline and fall of Rome.
A TV series faces a different logic. Little is left to the visual imagination and one is left trying to imagine what the characters are thinking, yet as deng pointed out there aren't any main characters in Foundation (apart from Seldon, who's mostly a sort of narrator in any case).
I thoroughly enjoyed the Asimov Foundation series (all of them, not just the original trilogy) and often wondered why nobody made a film about them. I think it'd be tricky to do them justice (a slow exploratory pace would be good) and hopefully not Hollywood-style like I Robot turned out to be (compared to the book).
I suppose not many people would flock to the cinema for slow scifi though (but then Blade Runner 2049 did alright...)
After reading Johnny Mnemonic I saw the movie and liked it so much that I bought it on DVD. We all have different tastes. I liked the mood of the movie, thought it worthy of being a cult classic.
Speaking of the Matrix, years ago I stumbled upon The Animatrix which was a surprisingly good set of animated shorts set in the world of the Matrix. My favorite one provided backstory on the robot holocaust (inflicted by humans on their sentient silicon-based slaves), that led to the collapse and reversal found in the main series. Highly recommended!
Fun fact: the sequels were supposed to be experienced by first watching The Animatrix, then playing the video game Enter the Matrix, then watching the 2nd and 3rd films. Try it sometime (if you can still find the game): it results in a much better experience.
There's a lot of weirdly introduced characters in the 2nd film especially that leave you thinking "wtf was that there for?" but were actually the continuation / conclusion / intersection of storylines started in one of the animatrix shorts (e.g. the kid) or the game (the other crew).
Also The Animatrix soundtrack was fire to my middle school ears. That specific robit revolution one definitely opened me up to anime-style stuff for the first time. There was also a book called "zen and the matrix" or something similar that had a bunch of essays which blew my 12 year old mind. I dropped out of my catholic confirmation course due to it! Forgot how much that influenced me.
Yup. The first film was the beginning. The Animatrix and Enter the Matrix were the middle. And the final 2 films the two-part conclusion. Just watching the films is like watching Act 1 of MacBeth, then skipping Acts 2-4 and going straight to Act 5. Not going to be the best viewing experience.
That said, they did make sure the films had enough injected explanation that movie-going audiences weren't totally lost, but unless you watched it the way the Wachowskis intended, it would come off as disoriented and exposition-heavy, nowhere near the quality of the first film.
Not that they are masterpieces on the level of Shakespeare. But having gone back and watched the first film, then Animatrix and played Enter the Matrix, before re-watching the final films as a two-parter, it does make sense as a consistent, coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end, and even quality throughout.
Thanks for the explanation. I haven't re-watched parts 2 and 3 in a very long time, now you made me curious to watch (or somehow read) those two missing parts and then try again :)
I really don't see Matrix borrowing that much from Neuromancer and both would be very different stories (in Neuromancer's case, a machine trying to hack itself out of its designed-in constraints), but I still believe Neuromancer is almost impossible to film.
I'll never forgive The Matrix for dumbing down the idea of running the AIs on the organic brains (Agent Smith's disgust is evident) and turning it into using humans as power generation devices.
Also, there is no way Neuromancer can be made into a 90 minute script. It's miniseries material, at least.
Off topic but it would be nice is sci fi could be made in which not every scene had to be the most amazing, innovative, creative, eye popping visual you've ever seen. Story might become the star then.
I love the fact that Solaris skips the whole getting to the space station bit - endless shots of Russian motorways, then suddenly we're there. Contrast to 2001 where getting to the moon is a significant chunk of the film.
There's a way to both make the story the star and have creative amazing visuals that perfectly support the story.
It's called radio.
Seriously, I've heard radio adaptations from the 1940s or 1950s of classic science fictions stories, and they were excellent.
As far as story goes, they could follow the original better than film or TV adaptions, because their cost is pretty much proportional to length. For a visual adaption, cost is a function of length, number of settings, and complexity of those settings. With a visual adaptation you often need to cut out whole settings to keep costs down.
As far as visuals go, you leave that to the listener. A few deft words from a character or from a narrator to provide a little guidance, along with some sound effects, and the listen's imagination can fill the rest.
I think one thing that is missing from modern Hollywood sci-fi is the feeling of the vastness and emptyness of space. Foundation certainly had that. It seems like everywhere they go in new sci-fi is crowded. Maybe this is because the overcrowded eco-doom dystopia trope is so deeply embedded in our culture recently or it could be because there's too much temptation to use CGI to create baroque environments.
Yeah, and then at the end they did some time travel nonsense and hacked into the Borg transwarp network and got back to Federation space in no time at all, and were one-shotting Borg cubes to boot.
That show never really had the courage of its convictions.
Responding to your own commnent only, I don't think that is necessarily true. Read some stories from the Revelation Space universe by Alistair Reynolds for a good example of how space can be as vast as it is, yet still traversed within human lifetimes and within known laws of physics.
In foundation, the "vastness" came from the fact that humanity has colonized thousands if not hundreds of thousands of planets, to a point where the location of the "origin" of humanity(Earth) and first colonies became lost to history and myths. When the plot revolves around finding this mythical and ancient "Earth" planet, one of the issues is that it would take them thousands of years to visit every inhabited solar system in our galaxy, and that's assuming that the records indicating their positions were accurate. In that way, yes, you could "warp" from one system to another in days, but the galaxy is still incredibly vast and largely unknown. It's just like right now you could hop on a plane and reach pretty much any point on this planet within say 72 hours, but it's still an incredibly vast place and if you were looking for something it's inconceivable you could visit every city on Earth to find it.
It was a terrible show about sad millennials who were stranded in space, without their anti-anxiety drugs and marijuana, lacking the basic survival instincts and common sense to tie their own shoes. And every episode ended in sad play out music. God I hate what they did to stargate in that show.
Did we watch the same show? The only drug-addicted person on the ship was well past millennial, and the various skills of the crew were what allowed them to survive.
It wasn't what I expected of Stargate, but it was watchable.
Only at the very beginning of the series. Trantor is basically Rome. It is densely populated to an unsustainable extent. It needs a huge empire to supply it. Once the empire collapses, Trantor collapses too. When it is visited later in the series its population is only a tiny fraction of what it once was.
There's not doubt that Asimov was pretty smart and there are a lot of interesting ideas in the Foundation books. However, I don't think that those will translate to the screen very well. Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting. Asimov is pretty similar to Lem in this regard, who also was much more interested in ideas than people. Of course, a good screenwriter can make up for that, but you can bet that people will be annoyed by all the additional stuff that is not in the book (like in Soderberg's "Solaris", for instance).
So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
Well, Hari Seldon - a recording of him at least - is a constant presence. There are lots of episodic tv series with varying cast. For example, Twilight Zone, Black Glass, etc. I'm sure all of the ages treated in the series can be fleshed out in sufficient detail to make for entertaining tv. As another example, Tolkiens original lore is not exactly ... visual ... but it gained lots of artist output in the decades between the publication of the series and Jackson's movies. Jackson's movies own cinematically almost as much to the artistic output by cadres of fantasy artists as much as to Tolkiens original work.
Also, considering the prequels and sequels canon, there is R. Daneel who, being older than the Galactic Empire (and, presumably, among its architects), is certainly one of the most interesting characters in science fiction.
I'd say Hari Seldon is the incarnation of an idea (the idea of "psychohistory"). We barely get to know him as a character, and since he is dead after 10 pages or so, he is not important for driving the plot forward.
I vehemently disagree with Tolkien not being a visual author. He spends a lot of words on descriptions, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. Asimov isn't nearly as interested in surroundings. Yes, he describes lots of planets throughout the series, but they are all pretty uniform. Trantor is a grey blob, others are mostly ice or desert, and that's it. Not something that really jumps out from the page.
Don't get me wrong: I like the series. I just think it is not very suited for TV. But of course, a good screenwriter might just do something great (for instance, I would have never thought that Chiang's "Story of your life" would make a great movie, but there you are).
Those are the reasons I think it could work... yes, the stories span centuries, but they are laid out in specific chapters, which not only are short enough to work in the scale of a TV show, but would allow for cast changes on a regular basis, and could be more of a Doctor Who-style series, with different eras expressed by different show-runners, directors and casts.
And it likewise works OK for the characters to not be fully fleshed out immediately - they aren't on TV either, as the actors and writers get used to the characters.
> So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
Wow that is big news, I did not know that! That book is so cinematic already, it leaps off the page. Should translate to the screen very well. Hope they do "Use of Weapons" and "Player of Games" also, in fact the entire Culture series is an amazing opportunity for TV conversion.
I agree that the Culture series would be perfect for TV. Banks is incredible with characters and dialogue, so I think the screenplay pretty much writes itself. His world-building is spectacular and would be a field day for any special effects studio: the orbitals, the "fire planet"... I would pay lots of money to see those on screen.
I don't see how the TV series will avoid the same problem as the books: the Culture is virtually omnipotent. Threats aren't exciting because, there is not threat (certainly none to the Culture and, as it turns out, very little to individual meat bags either).
Excession stood out in this regard, until it didn't.
(Consider Phlebas also stands out, but it's a unique culture book by a mile)
It's criminal that Banks never got to see his books as movies/series. Banks is, hands down, my favorite scifi author, so I hope the adaptation is well done.
I'm probably a minority here, but I think lack of huge characters could actually be a good thing. Too many sci-fi shows use science and technology as a glorified backdrop to showcase the characters, which quite often happen to be a recollection of same old tropes again and again.
"She had a rough childhood (20 minutes of expose, plus mandatory flashbacks in every episode), her mom died when she was 9 and dad was a cheating alcoholic, but now she's a badass who will kick ass for the next 4 seasons. And oh btw look: she has a cool hoverboard and here's white platicky computers which are REALLY powerful. Also, some omnipresent AI will play God."
If you are not identifying with the protagonist, everything else is simply meh. OTOH, interesting ideas are interesting on their own.
>Too many sci-fi shows use science and technology as a glorified backdrop to showcase the characters, which quite often happen to be a recollection of same old tropes again and again.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having the setting act as a backdrop, per se. Stories set in the Wild West aren't about the technology of guns and cattle wrangling, stories set in the Middle Ages aren't about swords and battlements, so stories set in the future don't need to be about technological extrapolation.
Poorly written characters or a protagonist you can't empathize with is often the result of writers caring more about the tech and the technobabble than the human drama. Good sci-fi provides a balance of both - a plausible setting that doesn't explain too much, with stories that focus on the characters and their relationship with the setting.
> Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting.
Depending on how they manage it, this might not be all that much of an obstacle. Cloud Atlas faced the same problem, but I thought that their use of an ensemble cast to tell a story that spanned the several centuries worked out just fine.
I agree with what you’ve written, but I also think that Black Mirror has recently shown that there is an audience for intelligent, idea-driven sci-fi without recurring characters.
Adaptations are never so strick. Hollywood wants original ideas they can take and craft/mold for film. A great recent example is Jeff Vandermeer's Annilation. Great book, totally different movie that is unique and stands on its own though I much prefer the original book.
Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is another great example; the book and movie are vastly different, yet both stand on there own and one could argue are great for different reasons. I'd be hardpressed to pick which I love more.
I do agree with a lot of what you are saying about Asimov's Foundation series; however I think the core ideas are what they'll focus on and most likely they'll introduce a host entirely new characters when they rework it as a screenplay.
100% agree. Most of the time the adaptation is not an improvement.
Maybe a better/clearer point is this: I think Foundation is actually more suited for this kind of treatment because of it's 'flaws'. Aka, the idea is great and the potential is there to make it into something successful.
Of course, we'll have to wait to see if Apple/the production company can pull it off.
On a side note: I wish someone would buy the rights and reboot Babylon 5. I'm going through it with my GF for the 4th or 5th time since it aired. Still one of the best SciFi shows ever storywise and I have a soft spot for those Amiga VideoToaster graphics. Plus Vorlons.
I'm with you. I like Foundation too much to accept anyone's interpretation but my own. But who knows? Apple's take might kick ass. I liked the Galactica reboot until the Starbuck weirdness in Season 3.
If memory serves there was a fight between the showrunners / writers and the network between season 2 and 3 of Battlestar Galactica, on top of the writers strike that happened around that time. Imo, it really dragged the quality of the show down.
It could potentially work if it's a series rather than a single 2hr movie. Too much to cram into a movie, but a series could develop the story and characters over multiple episodes/seasons.
For the record: HBO was apparently supposed to do this a couple years ago [1].
I wonder how well the Foundation books will translate to the screen. Given the segmented format of the first three Foundation novels, it almost seems like a mockumentary-style exposition would be necessary (which could preserve things like the cool Encyclopedia Galactica quote epigraphs).
I have it a bit mixed up in my head, but yeah, Sony announced they would do one abandoned it, and then HBO bought it and announced it and abandoned it. So this would be the third step (but I seem to have a memory of that this has been going on a lot longer).
It will end up being a shoot-em-up clone of Star Wars. All the psychological aspects of the books just won't be interesting enough to mask the fact that there is essentially no action or excitement or romance. They'll probably turn Harry Seldon into sort of a Yoda character. Using the precepts of psychohistory, what a few people will think about the film is unpredictable but as a population of movie goers, it will be boring and unintelligible.
If someone managed to make a lot of cash and success adapting LOTR (for a long time thought to be "impossible" to adapt to big screens) someone can equally adapt Foundation, given a bit of space for fixing quirks and changing a few things here and there. Let's remain skeptical, alright, but this is actually pretty awesome news if true and I certainly hope for the best.
This is my biggest concern about the adaptation. The mathematical influence of psychohistory is very important. Take it away, and the Foundation's expansion seems like chance or manifest destiny.
There's something about the Asimov books that make the mundane interesting. I loved the planning aspect of the foundation's millennia long plan. I'm dubious how a book that focuses so much on slow progress progress and averting major crisis will translate to TV.
(And I obviously love the novels, so I'm a bit biased)
The novels, especially the first couple, are honestly pretty episodic. Given that they were published as magazine serials before they were books that's not surprising. But each section of the story deals with a self-contained crisis within the context of the arcing narrative, which imo fits pretty nicely into modern tv storytelling.
I recently re-read Foundation (only the first) with my kid, and I have to agree. The initial chapters with Hari Seldon, and the later segments with Salvor Hardin and Hober Mallow, fit exactly the mold you mentioned. They even call the episodes "Seldon Crises". The characters, as always with Asimov, are a bit overdrawn, but there are some gems there as well.
They should just spin out what's left of their computing hardware and operating system business, this segment is as vestigial as the appendix to the company now.
Anyone else feel that now with tracking users to the extend of CA and the user prediction software that it's getting into the realms of Hari Seldon? And not only track what's going to happen, but also shape society with posts timed at the right time, and sent to the right people to nudge society into certain paths. We already see it with what happened to voting.
The Foundation could use modernization. The "big ideas" are still interesting, but the nuts and bolts of putting characters in a world to act out a story has them inadvertently soaked in late 1940's United States culture.
I have failed to interest young people in the book, they seem to be put off by virtually all of the characters being cigar or pipe smoking men with females relegated to the secretarial positions where they are summoned by the very modern push button on a desk. I think there is also the very modern push button on the floor of the office which closes the door.
As a story it now suffers from what to modern readers are inadvertent anachronisms. Asimov seems to have meant to write "Here we are, maybe 15 minutes in the future and off we go into the stars and centuries beyond!", instead we've got "Once society regresses to a state which oppresses half the population and is reduced to primitive pre-electronic technology we can finally get on with a grand future!"
A TV series which starts 15 minutes in our future and presents the same ideas could be a fine framework to fill with characters people care about, but something other than world war two era United States industrialists please.
Wasn't the main character who eventually discovers the secrets a the end of the book a female?
Also, was the book really meant to be Utopian in tone? I thought it was just a good space story, one of my most enjoyable reads ever (I read it when I was 23).
Yes, there are significant female characters, I think primarily academics which in context are the most important kind of people.
I didn't notice anything off when I first read it, but that was in the 1970s and I was a young studious male. I remembered it as a fun space story and one which glorified researchers and academics as important over generals and politicians… which probably is a lot of the appeal to a certain audience.
I think now it's sort of like watching space movies from the 1950s. Model spaceships swinging along on wires in front of a painting and zippers up the back of the alien monster's skin were the norm then and just ignored, now they are moment ruining features.
You are correct that the books are dated, but I have found the occasional teenager (I teach high school) who is able to look past that and be fascinated with the big ideas inside. I loved the books as a teenager, but now I have issues with some of the big ideas. Nonetheless, they are worthy of note.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadInstead we end up with endless comic book treatments. I dont not want to see the fourth origin story of Spiderman, Superman or Batman. However, I have to concede with a good script and director, these sometimes work.
I wish I could see more more Heinlein on film, e.g. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and Stranger in a Strange Land. Partial treatments were in The Last Starfigher and Star Treks What of Charlie.
In either the first or second book I seem to remember one of the only female characters is depicted succeeding despite being a woman. Which is a very 50s view.
Same with Heinlein, almost all the women in stranger in a strange land are cringe worthy. They literally play in the pool all day long and are basically sexual playthings for the men.
I read (in the case of Asimov, re-read) both a couple of years ago, they've really aged poorly. While the concepts are cool, much of the stories would have to be rewritten or you'll have some real cognitive dissonance with the female parts.
The later Asimov books and prequels are better as they were written in the 80s. But then they suffer from his retconning of bringing all his series together. I don't know what others think about it as I read most of them before the internet, but I felt it was very contrived.
I agree that the adaptation will have to be adapted a lot in order to be shown today. I wouldn't even mind if they modified the society structure a bit (or a lot) in order to make the initial premise more believable.
Who would play Jubal? Kevin Spacey would be perfect, for meta-reasons even.
I’d imagine a similar treatment might work for the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, unlike the Netflix’s the Expanse where it devolved from excellent work building into a single overearnest spaceship crew solving all the solar system’s problems.
https://deadline.com/2016/10/space-drama-the-expanse-streami...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Fell_to_Earth
So, I am extremely pessimistic, even though I would like to be excited about this news. The team behind it also leaves me feeling ambivalent. On one hand, it's a guy who has just made superhero movies (just the sort that would I would expect to destroy a thinky story like Foundation) but also the guy who made The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was actually pretty good (though rarely as smart/deep as the cast deserved; Lena Heady, in particular).
I love that scifi TV and film is seeing such a resurgence, but I sure do hate to see my favorites get butchered.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(film)
I likely would have enjoyed it more had I not been expecting an Asimov story on film. I like Will Smith a lot, but somehow he's been in multiple films that ruined favorite books from my youth (I Am Legend is another book that I love and that had an abysmal film adaptation...I don't blame Smith, though, as he did a great job even in a very cheesy film). I, Robot was also pretty cheesy even without the weight of trying to live up to Asimov's legacy.
But, then we got a closer look at them a bit later and they were flying through the air, bouncing off the walls, and just all around looking like cartoon monsters. I'm just not frightened by cartoons. And, it really killed the slow, calm, horror of the book for me. The things that made the book unique and scary in a way that sticks with you are just fundamentally different from the jump scares of the film.
The Vincent Price adaptation (The Last Man On Earth) remains the most faithful film version of I Am Legend, in spirit if not in specific detail. I don't really mind when a movie script changes some plot points or some character details to make it work on screen, I just dislike it when the spirit of the thing is thrown away and replaced with blockbuster tropes (which is my primary complaint about I, Robot, as well).
But, again, I thought Will Smith was excellent in the role. I just really hate what they did with the vamps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_(short_story)
It's a very good movie, even if not faithful to the original.
The movie didn't adapt any particular book or short story, but that doesn't mean it didn't try to be faithful to Asimov.
In the movie you have thousands of robots running around killing and injuring countless humans. That's something I'm quite sure would never happen in Asimov's writing.
Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope that everyone before him used (all the way back to the first use of the term "robot" in Karel Čapek's R.U.R.). So, despite that groundbreaking approach, what do we get in the first major motion picture about his robot series? A robot uprising...
At the end of Robots and Empire he allows Mandamus to activate his "nuclear intensifier", which will eventually render the Earth uninhabitable over the course of several decades (thereby driving humanity to colonize more stars). R. Giskard decided it was in the best interest of humanity for them to disperse, but couldn't rule out the possibility that some humans would be harmed in the process, so he permanently shut down.
And I think there are at least some implications that Daneel was at least peripherally involved in much larger events than the person-by-person manipulation we see in the prequel books directly (ie. famines), but he saved himself by keeping himself more remote from them than literally pulling the switch.
Had the master robot in I, Robot actually suffered for its implementation of the zeroth law I think that would have been at least a little more in keeping with Asimov's vision, so I think it's a bit important to recognize that robots CAN do great harm with the zeroth law, there are just consequences.
(and we can probably ignore the fact that the three-Bs extended books resurrected Dors and iirc somewhat even Giskard)
Daneel and Giskard's interventions are scary, but in the end they do appear to be truly in keeping with a species-wide application of the first law, in that their attempts to 'preserve humanity' were not just a rote idea of "keep humanity alive at any cost" but to preserve the components of humanity that they didn't themselves understand like individuality, creativity, and a drive to learn and explore (very star trekky really).
If I want to get too deep into the subject, it seems like a robot that interpreted the first law so narrowly would never be capable of developing a zeroth law to begin with, because its focus would be so intent on a narrow idea of what a human was, ignoring social concepts altogether (as for eg. Solarian robots do).
To be fair though it has been a REALLY long time since I've seen the movie.
I don't know how you can say it both captures the spirit of Asimov's writings while also having a robot uprising as the central plot device. Asimov explicitly rejected the "Frankenstein complex" that was present in robot related sci-fi up to that point.
Also I don't think Asimov's robots would have ever had a slave mode that rendered them immune to application of the laws. They probably still would have gone inoperative before actually carrying out a massacre.
Yes, technically. But practically, every single story showed how some robot was able to reason his way into violating the spirit of the laws. The movie was very crude about showing it, but it was the same concept present in every Asimov short story.
> Asimov was unique in that he was the first to start with the premise that humans _could_ safely develop advanced robots, rather than using the "robot uprising" trope
I, robot the movie did that too. It showed that a robot could glimpse at the spirit behind the laws and act not according to the letter, but according to the spirit of the laws. Finally, he helped the humans thwart the uprising, and the movie ends with the suggestion that he will influence other robots to see his viewpoint.
Huh? There is literally one story (Little Lost Robot) where there is a "loophole" in the laws (and only because the First Law is modified to drop the "or through inaction allow a human to come to harm" bit).
EDIT: in thinking about it further, I guess I'd add That Thou Are Mindful Of Him to the list of "loophole" stories. Still, two examples out of dozens of stories is very much the exception, not the rule.
Reason: the robots decide to redefine the term "human"
Catch that rabbit: robot ignores first law unless forced by humans in a sticky situation (though this one is a bit ehhh)
Liar: to avoid "hurting" the feelings of humans, a mind-reading robot hurts them in a much more real way
Escape: due to a technical interpreation of hyperspatial travel, robot prevents humans from discovering hyperspatial travel. Vilating first law in the long term since humanity couldn't survive without a means of fast space travel.
Evitable conflict: machines decide that the only way to perfectly follow the laws is to take control over humanity, which is the exact thing the laws were supposed to prevent.
Little lost robot: you said it
That's 7 out of the 9 stories in I, Robot. I have noticed this in most of his short stories and novels.
In universe, maybe. But the actual purpose of the Three Laws as a plot device was for them to be violated, and provide the crux of the story that followed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16812667
In all of Asimov's robot short stories (including I, Robot), there was only one instance of a robot that violated the Three Laws. That's far from a common theme...
Yes, there was the 0th Law in Robots and Empire (that later appears in the Foundation prequels), but that is a far more nuanced concept than the ideas in the I, Robot movie, where robots ran around killing and injuring humans indiscriminately.
However, in every single story, the robot(s) found a loophole in the laws that resulted in going against the spirit of the laws. It's true that the movie showed a very crude version vs the very nuanced take in the stories. But I attribute that to the medium of film making itself.
One is book vs script length. A film is 100 pages. Novels are 250+. This means big story-arch rewrites. It can really kill plot & character development. This is where series open up a lot of possibility.
That's usually the biggest adaption, but there are lots of other big things that must change. Novels can do character thoughts, exposition and other things well. For example, a strategic battle scene will work in a book. In a film, it's near impossible so they focus on action and drama. Films do visual representation, so action-rich scenes work. They get characters for "free," actors will represent a highly nuanced person in a way you immediately understand.
These add up to a big re-write, that cannot be avoided.
Writers like Asimov are the very best storytellers. They work on their own schedule, write what comes to them, discard bad work... If you handed a good novelist the task of writing a LOTR prequel novel about Frodo's parents, by October... It probably won't be as good as Tolkien's.
You just can't replicate genius on commission.
This is really evident in Game of Thrones. The early seasons capture what's great about the books. A politically driven story that isn't boring, a novel approach to magical realism... Early seasons were loyal to the book. The latest season was mostly "off-script." The politics got stupid. Characters wandered closer to fantasy tropes. The "realism" part of magical realism was gone. Apart from big plot points, it wasn't written by GRRM and it showed. So, it is not good in the ways he's good. It was also written much quicker, on a schedule.
It'll be hard to capture Asimov in a series, harder than GRRM I expect. His stories are just not story driven enough.
His main plot device is not a spaceship or a time machine, it's a fictional theory, psychohistory. How do you capture that on film, line charts?
Good luck to them though. I love sci fi.
Personally I pay €15 per month for an Apple Music family plan because at the time it was cheaper than Spotify and it works well enough for me. Hopefully Apple’s new video services becomes part of that same subscription but with the mess of their iCloud storage options I won’t hold my breath.
(I really enjoy the books, so I would like to experience that adaptation.)
Abandon all hope...
I really hope this is good but they need to go full game of thrones in terms of scope and adherence to the source material. I'm so tired of seeing "Based on a story by Philip K Dick" and then basically seeing stereotypical sci-fi with a romance plot thrown in and any trace of the original message of the story removed.
It's hard to describe but the stories seemed to be not more than sketches without richness or detail, and many of the potentially interesting ideas were never fully explored.
To be fair, there was something strangely appealing about it, and by the end I found I quite liked it even with its flaws - probably because there were some really imaginative concepts underneath (the Foundation I suppose).
This could probably be attributed to its pulp origins -- it wasn't originally a set of novels, but a bunch of pulp serials that were in the same universe.
I think given this, that Asimov was about drama an the unfolding, in a SF backdrop; TV is a very good venue.
As mentioned in another comment, it began as a serialized work, and it never really escapes Asimov's "make it up as you go along" style, resulting in quite a meandering series. I think it would have to be a very loose adaptation to make it interesting.
But that's part of the unique strength of the early Foundation books. What makes the experience powerful is that the reader's imagination is left to fill in the gaps. The trick was to write a sufficiently epic framework, which succeeded because inspiration was drawn from Gibbon's famous account of the decline and fall of Rome.
A TV series faces a different logic. Little is left to the visual imagination and one is left trying to imagine what the characters are thinking, yet as deng pointed out there aren't any main characters in Foundation (apart from Seldon, who's mostly a sort of narrator in any case).
I suppose not many people would flock to the cinema for slow scifi though (but then Blade Runner 2049 did alright...)
Though I'd love to see a series based on the Bridge trilogy. And his version of Alien 3 would have been fascinating.
There's a lot of weirdly introduced characters in the 2nd film especially that leave you thinking "wtf was that there for?" but were actually the continuation / conclusion / intersection of storylines started in one of the animatrix shorts (e.g. the kid) or the game (the other crew).
That said, they did make sure the films had enough injected explanation that movie-going audiences weren't totally lost, but unless you watched it the way the Wachowskis intended, it would come off as disoriented and exposition-heavy, nowhere near the quality of the first film.
Not that they are masterpieces on the level of Shakespeare. But having gone back and watched the first film, then Animatrix and played Enter the Matrix, before re-watching the final films as a two-parter, it does make sense as a consistent, coherent story with a beginning, middle, and end, and even quality throughout.
I'll never forgive The Matrix for dumbing down the idea of running the AIs on the organic brains (Agent Smith's disgust is evident) and turning it into using humans as power generation devices.
Also, there is no way Neuromancer can be made into a 90 minute script. It's miniseries material, at least.
edit: Apparently Amazon is making Snow Crash: https://www.avclub.com/amazon-is-making-a-snow-crash-tv-show...
Only half-serious, since they pretty much go to the opposite extreme.
It's called radio.
Seriously, I've heard radio adaptations from the 1940s or 1950s of classic science fictions stories, and they were excellent.
As far as story goes, they could follow the original better than film or TV adaptions, because their cost is pretty much proportional to length. For a visual adaption, cost is a function of length, number of settings, and complexity of those settings. With a visual adaptation you often need to cut out whole settings to keep costs down.
As far as visuals go, you leave that to the listener. A few deft words from a character or from a narrator to provide a little guidance, along with some sound effects, and the listen's imagination can fill the rest.
As an example of the kind of science fiction that was available on radio, here is the episode list for the early '50s program "Dimension X": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dimension_X_episodes
Stoked to have discovered the handful of prequel novellas providing backstory.
It's also one of the few books that made me want to throw it across the room when I finished it.
That show never really had the courage of its convictions.
Even if we don't count the empty space, it's pretty enormous.
It wasn't what I expected of Stargate, but it was watchable.
There's not doubt that Asimov was pretty smart and there are a lot of interesting ideas in the Foundation books. However, I don't think that those will translate to the screen very well. Since the books span many centuries, characters come and go and are mostly not very fleshed out or interesting. Asimov is pretty similar to Lem in this regard, who also was much more interested in ideas than people. Of course, a good screenwriter can make up for that, but you can bet that people will be annoyed by all the additional stuff that is not in the book (like in Soderberg's "Solaris", for instance).
So I'm much more thrilled about Amazon developing a series based on Banks' "Consider Phlebas"...
BTW. No spoilers please - I'm re-reading in chronological order.
And it likewise works OK for the characters to not be fully fleshed out immediately - they aren't on TV either, as the actors and writers get used to the characters.
Wow that is big news, I did not know that! That book is so cinematic already, it leaps off the page. Should translate to the screen very well. Hope they do "Use of Weapons" and "Player of Games" also, in fact the entire Culture series is an amazing opportunity for TV conversion.
Excession stood out in this regard, until it didn't.
(Consider Phlebas also stands out, but it's a unique culture book by a mile)
Thats because it's not primarily about the action but about the technological, social and societal issues and conflicts. For me at least.
"She had a rough childhood (20 minutes of expose, plus mandatory flashbacks in every episode), her mom died when she was 9 and dad was a cheating alcoholic, but now she's a badass who will kick ass for the next 4 seasons. And oh btw look: she has a cool hoverboard and here's white platicky computers which are REALLY powerful. Also, some omnipresent AI will play God."
If you are not identifying with the protagonist, everything else is simply meh. OTOH, interesting ideas are interesting on their own.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having the setting act as a backdrop, per se. Stories set in the Wild West aren't about the technology of guns and cattle wrangling, stories set in the Middle Ages aren't about swords and battlements, so stories set in the future don't need to be about technological extrapolation.
Poorly written characters or a protagonist you can't empathize with is often the result of writers caring more about the tech and the technobabble than the human drama. Good sci-fi provides a balance of both - a plausible setting that doesn't explain too much, with stories that focus on the characters and their relationship with the setting.
Depending on how they manage it, this might not be all that much of an obstacle. Cloud Atlas faced the same problem, but I thought that their use of an ensemble cast to tell a story that spanned the several centuries worked out just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
...except for the last three, I think? They are a more typical epic space adventure that takes place within a single lifetime.
Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is another great example; the book and movie are vastly different, yet both stand on there own and one could argue are great for different reasons. I'd be hardpressed to pick which I love more.
I do agree with a lot of what you are saying about Asimov's Foundation series; however I think the core ideas are what they'll focus on and most likely they'll introduce a host entirely new characters when they rework it as a screenplay.
Maybe a better/clearer point is this: I think Foundation is actually more suited for this kind of treatment because of it's 'flaws'. Aka, the idea is great and the potential is there to make it into something successful.
Of course, we'll have to wait to see if Apple/the production company can pull it off.
On a side note: I wish someone would buy the rights and reboot Babylon 5. I'm going through it with my GF for the 4th or 5th time since it aired. Still one of the best SciFi shows ever storywise and I have a soft spot for those Amiga VideoToaster graphics. Plus Vorlons.
So they're adapting the worst Culture book. It's probably the easiest to adapt, but it's by far the least interesting.
I wonder how well the Foundation books will translate to the screen. Given the segmented format of the first three Foundation novels, it almost seems like a mockumentary-style exposition would be necessary (which could preserve things like the cool Encyclopedia Galactica quote epigraphs).
[1] http://www.player.one/foundation-tv-show-whatever-happened-h...
https://hbowatch.com/hbo-acquires-asimovs-foundation-series-...
If they made it like the books, those of us that have read it would probably love it, but I doubt it would be popular.
(And I obviously love the novels, so I'm a bit biased)
They should just spin out what's left of their computing hardware and operating system business, this segment is as vestigial as the appendix to the company now.
I have failed to interest young people in the book, they seem to be put off by virtually all of the characters being cigar or pipe smoking men with females relegated to the secretarial positions where they are summoned by the very modern push button on a desk. I think there is also the very modern push button on the floor of the office which closes the door.
As a story it now suffers from what to modern readers are inadvertent anachronisms. Asimov seems to have meant to write "Here we are, maybe 15 minutes in the future and off we go into the stars and centuries beyond!", instead we've got "Once society regresses to a state which oppresses half the population and is reduced to primitive pre-electronic technology we can finally get on with a grand future!"
A TV series which starts 15 minutes in our future and presents the same ideas could be a fine framework to fill with characters people care about, but something other than world war two era United States industrialists please.
Also, was the book really meant to be Utopian in tone? I thought it was just a good space story, one of my most enjoyable reads ever (I read it when I was 23).
I didn't notice anything off when I first read it, but that was in the 1970s and I was a young studious male. I remembered it as a fun space story and one which glorified researchers and academics as important over generals and politicians… which probably is a lot of the appeal to a certain audience.
I think now it's sort of like watching space movies from the 1950s. Model spaceships swinging along on wires in front of a painting and zippers up the back of the alien monster's skin were the norm then and just ignored, now they are moment ruining features.